Speedy storage server sales stumps sysadmin scribe: Who buys this?

Sysadmin blog Every once in a while I need to ask a question I know is going to get me in a world of trouble. It's the sort of question that triggers panicked emails from corporate PRs, and sometimes even the odd thinly veiled threat for daring to ask such things in a public forum.

But every so often something bothers me enough that I feel compelled to start asking things I know are going to cause a fuss.

Finding a kernel of truth

The first question for which I have no answer involves VMware's marketing around VSAN. I'm baffled.

When VSAN launched we were flooded with marketing blurbage that claimed VSAN was better than competing server SANs because it was built right into the hypervisor. It's in the kernel! It's faster! Buy VSAN and not the other guys! It solves cancer and grows you a full, thick head of hair! Overwhelm social media and flood every single industry event with VSAN; go go go!

OK, OK, VMware; let me hit the pause button so I can compare a few things.

For at least the past 12 months (and probably longer) VMware has been saying they are ready for "100 per cent virtual". Any and every workload is ready to be virtualised. Their hypervisor is efficient, refined, and ready to take over the world.

I don't really question that assertion. In truth, I haven't been able to throw anything at VMware's hypervisor that it can't take like a champ … and I get paid good money to try.

But wait: a non-VSAN server SAN is just a virtualised workload. Maxta, Nutanix, SimpliVity, and so forth – these use VMs that "own" disks and SSDs on the local host using the hypervisor's raw disk mapping capabilities. Server SANs lash together multiple servers' worth of storage into one big pool of centralised storage that serves the whole cluster.

If VMware is ready to serve any workload – including the most ridiculously demanding tier-one enterprise applications, big data and so on – then shouldn't it be more than capable of running non-VMware server SANs?

In theory, being built into the hypervisor means that VSAN doesn't have to deal with the context-switching overhead that fully virtual server SANs experience.

In practice, this isn't supposed to matter: because VMware's hypervisor is made out of such amazing awesomesauce, time spent in the hypervisor is supposed to be completely negligible (especially given that you can allocate set amounts of RAM and CPU etc for a given VM, and do things like raw disk mapping; it makes the hypervisor's job a lot easier).

I personally see two conflicting assertions here: that VSAN is so much better than fully virtualised server SANs because it runs in the hypervisor, and that the VSAN-less hypervisor is so awesome it can easily handle any workload – like, er, fully virtualised server SANs.

No doubt someone will be along to tell me which marketing droids are correct and which are wrong.

Storage speed-up: Is it really worth it?

The other big question I have concerns centralised storage acceleration (CSA) products. My company does some work with Proximal Data, so I'm immersed in this world on a regular basis. There are innumerable other products out there but they all boil down to "we will make centralised storage suck less."

Considering how many SANs and NASes are sold every single day, and how many of the things are deployed around the world, the CSA world's claim of "making your centralised storage go faster" seems pretty enticing. Buying new centralised storage is expensive, and it's only the newer (and most expensive) ones that come with the native ability to "insert SSD, watch it go faster." CSA gear isn't going away anytime soon.

The economics of some CSAs, however, fail to make sense to me.

The simple read caches, (VMware's Flash Read Cache, Proximal Data's Autocache and so forth), I understand the value of. These make sense to me because they're: A, dirt simple, and B, they're cheap.

Simple is very important. Add flash, enable software, go faster. There is nothing to "design". There are no architectural considerations. You don't even need to install the CSA software on every host: the more hosts that you bung SSDs into, the faster your centralised storage is for all hosts*.

What's more important, however, is "cheap". This is because every dollar you spend on your read caching solution – be that buying SSDs or the software – is a dollar you're not putting into something else. Like, say, faster centralised storage in the first place.

CSAs of any variety only make economic sense if the cost of deploying them is lower than the cost of upgrading your centralised storage to achieve the same benefit.

This gets even messier in that A (simple) influences B (cheap). The costs that need to be considered are not merely the capital costs of the server flash and the software to make it go, but the operational costs of managing and maintaining the thing.

Time spending tuning your system isn't necessarily time spent wisely

A properly implemented CSA has virtually no operational overhead. Install it, turn it on, and never think about it again. It should automatically make the best use of the flash you feed it. No tinkering with settings, no per-VM allocation; it just works.

Every button you need to push to make your CSA useful is time you could be spending doing something more important, and time is money.

Now, consider that when you walk away from the simple read caches, you layer on complexity. Instead of "push button, receive bacon", you now need to worry about network considerations for replication traffic between nodes. That means additional NICs, switch ports, cabling, network isolation and so forth. Or, if you run your replication traffic on an existing network, you get to add that to your list of things to monitor and fret about what's eating all your throughput.

If a flash disk dies in a simple read cache setup, it sucks a little for the server that is no longer "going faster," but you're not really losing any essential functionality. In some of the more alarming CSAs out there, you now have to worry about getting those SSDs replaced ASAP, otherwise you risk some of the write cache elements not having a redundant copy**.

This leads me to the actual question that has been bugging me about CSAs. What is the value of a centralised storage acceleration product that has all the complexity, risk and design considerations of a full-blown server SAN but doesn't actually store your data within its mesh?

If, for all that complexity and worry, the CSA product merely accelerates centralised storage I already have, why, in an era of VSANs, would I buy it? Especially if the cost of the CSA software in question is the same (or more) than the server SANs available on the market?

Doesn't it make more sense to just build a server SAN, and use the flash cache and data locality features that are part of the server SAN to ensure all your data goes faster, and task your traditional centralised SAN with something else? Or skip the complexity altogether and either use a simple read cache? Or how about just buying a faster SAN in the first place?

None of my tests show there to be a $/IOPS benefit in choosing a CSA product over just using a server SAN***. There can be a $/TB benefit, but the low cost of software-only server SANs, such as Maxta, turn those into edge cases.

So why do the more complicated – and expensive – CSA products out there keep selling?

I don't have an answer to this one. Either I'm missing something pretty fundamental about the economics of this all – the possibility of which is why questions like this bug the hell out of me – or there are a bunch of companies out there making non-optimal purchasing decisions. I'd dearly love to know which it is. ®

Bootnotes

* Due to IOPS on hosts with the read cache enabled coming out of the local SSD, there are more IOPS available at the centralised storage device for all hosts. I don't really want to get into the semantics of it here in this article, but it's a real thing. If four out of eight hosts in a cluster have read cache, you will notice the other four speed up.

** Thankfully, not all of the write caching CSAs are this badly designed. Some have the ability to resize cache for VMs on the fly in order to ensure reconvergence is possible given the amount of flash now available to the mesh.

*** OK, that's a small lie. There are some CSAs that turn a chunk of RAM into cache, in addition to flash. If you tune your benchmarks just right they'll show consistently better than server SANs.